A group opposed to some patent litigation applauded the push for harmonizing International Trade Commission patent injunction standards on patent assertion entities (PAEs) from the White House (CD June 5 p12). “A more equitable standard for obtaining an injunction, as called for by the White House, would make it far harder for PAEs to use the ITC process as a means to extort licensing fees from legitimate businesses,” said Director Matt Tanielian of the ITC Working Group, which described itself as having more than a dozen members, in a news release. It cited an FTC statement on the “dangerous discrepancy” between injunction standards at the ITC and federal courts that said “the ITC may attract suits by patentees that are less likely to obtain injunctions in district court, potentially leading to a hold-up and the resulting consumer harm."
A group opposed to some patent litigation applauded the push for harmonizing International Trade Commission patent injunction standards on patent enforcement entities (PAEs) from the White House (CD June 5 p12). “A more equitable standard for obtaining an injunction, as called for by the White House, would make it far harder for PAEs to use the ITC process as a means to extort licensing fees from legitimate businesses,” said Director Matt Tanielian of the ITC Working Group, which described itself as having more than a dozen members, in a news release. It cited an FTC statement on the “dangerous discrepancy” between injunction standards at the ITC and federal courts that said “the ITC may attract suits by patentees that are less likely to obtain injunctions in district court, potentially leading to a hold-up and the resulting consumer harm."
The rural-urban broadband divide deserves a more granular look, with a more precise breakdown of community size and consideration of proximity to bigger cities, said NTIA State Broadband Initiative Director Anne Neville and Department of Commerce Research Economist David Beede in a report released Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/15BIvrm). “By assigning communities to one of five categories, it becomes clear that there is not a simple rural/urban divide,” they said. “Rather, one group of rural Americans has even less broadband access than previously understood and two groups of urban Americans have more broadband than is typically identified.” They advised against looking just at population density when considering broadband availability and recommended instead looking to a community’s proximity to a metropolitan statistical area. The report analyzes five subgroups based on population density, however, as a frame for broadband availability -- Central Cities, with 2,754 residents per square mile, Suburbs with 1,970, Small Towns with 1,447, Exurbs with 37 and then those areas dubbed Very Rural with 11. The resulting picture of availability is “richer” and more “refined,” the report said. “For example, at wireline download speeds of 50 Mbps, broadband availability varies from 14 percent (Very Rural), 32 percent (Exurban), 35 percent (Small Town), 62 percent (Central City), to 67 percent (Suburban), even though the overall broadband availability was 63 percent in urban areas compared to 23 percent in rural areas.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is unsure if the timing is right for Congress to embrace a la carte video legislation, he said during an interview at the Capitol Tuesday. Video programmers and distributors “are so powerful, their lobbyists are so powerful. It’s hard to believe,” he said. McCain recently introduced the Television Consumer Freedom Act (S-912), which aims to encourage video programmers and distributors to offer a la carte video to consumers, deter broadcasters from downgrading their over-the-air services and amend the sports blackout rules (CD May 10 p2). House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., during a recent interview for C-SPAN’s “The Communicators” series, threw cold water on the bill and said it’s unlikely to be “the panacea many think it is” (CD May 24 p3).
Lockheed Martin successfully completed functional integration tests of the spacecraft bus and network communications equipment on the GPS III satellite. The testing “assured that all bus subsystems are functioning normally and ready for final integration with the satellite’s navigation payload,” it said in a press release (http://bit.ly/139dNnJ). The bus navigation payload, produced by ITT Exelis, will be delivered to Lockheed’s GPS Processing Facility this year, it said. The GPS III satellite program is aimed at replacing aging GPS satellites in orbit, “while improving capability to meet the evolving demands of military, commercial and civilian users,” it said.
"Poor lawyers,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told the sold-out FCBA Luncheon crowd Wednesday. “I know there’s a dozen questions you want to ask. You're not allowed.” Instead, President Barack Obama’s appointee answered prepared questions from the recipients of the association’s college scholarships. “I wanted to be like my childhood heroine Nancy Drew,” she said in response to a student who wondered why she decided to go to law school. The “worst decision” of her life was failing to follow the advice of her mentor to seek out a judicial clerkship after law school, she said. Sotomayor also spoke of the difficulty of staying grounded to the average American. It’s “not easy,” she said, lamenting the fact that people put her on a pedestal and treat her differently now. “I try to not be the president who had never seen a scanner at a supermarket,” Sotomayor said, referring to an incident involving then-President George H.W. Bush. “And I really do worry about that, because there is a possibility of that happening when you live the sort of sheltered life that I do. You have to work at it.” Sotomayor had hopeful advice for lawyers trying to get a job in a poor legal market. “In this market, sometimes you have to sort of change the normal expectations and just beat the bushes until you find something, get a toehold, and move yourself from there,” she said. Take a job at a small law firm at whatever salary they'll pay, and “break your posterior” to impress them, she said. “Don’t give up. And remember that the value of any job is not the importance that other people put on that job,” she said. “There’s a lot of law students who think, ‘My gosh, if I don’t get a position in a particular kind of law firm, I've failed.’ … If you let others measure the value of what you do, you are likely to be unhappy."
The NFL said it extended its agreement with the Verizon Wireless by four years, and added an expansion of the content the carrier will stream over devices on its network. The $1 billion deal extension allows Verizon Wireless to stream NFL’s Sunday afternoon games to its customers based on their home market. Verizon Wireless already streams NFL’s Sunday, Monday and Thursday night games (http://bit.ly/10Om9Da). Verizon’s original 2010 agreement with the NFL cost the carrier $720 million. About 5 percent of Verizon Wireless subscribers would need to subscribe to the service and add an additional 1 GB of data to their plans over the course of the NFL season in order for the carrier to break even on the deal, said New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin in an email to investors. Since about 10-15 percent of DirecTV customers currently subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, the worst Verizon Wireless can do is break even, Chaplin said. If 10-15 percent of Verizon Wireless’s customers subscribe to the service, the deal would raise per-share earnings by 3-5 percent, Chaplin said.
Dish Network urged the FCC not to rush approval of SoftBank’s proposed acquisition of Sprint Nextel. SoftBank’s request “is based on the remarkable assertion that not acting immediately would be illegal,” Dish said in a letter (http://bit.ly/1b4QVZi) to the FCC in response to SoftBank’s May 29 ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/ZvNdZ3). The commission isn’t required by the Communications Act or any other statute to act on proposed transactions by a certain date, Dish said. The applicants have failed to provide any information regarding their plans “to provide service in unserved and underserved areas of the United States,” it said. SoftBank hasn’t disclosed its plans “to use the more than 200 MHz for mobile broadband spectrum at stake in the transaction,” it said. “Far from violating the policy of neutrality, waiting a few weeks avoids tipping the scale in favor of the incumbent proposal.” SoftBank continued in an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/11rYmZn) to urge the FCC to approve the transaction. There are “strong, unrefuted public interest benefits of the transaction, including strengthening Sprint and Clearwire to better compete ... and the benefits of additional scale when negotiating with global equipment vendors,” it said about a meeting with Clearwire, Sprint and staff from Commissioner Ajit Pai’s office. Under FCC precedent and the Communications Act, the FCC should process the application “without regard to other possible offers,” SoftBank said.
The House and Senate authors of the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act asked the FCC in a letter Wednesday for a progress report on the implementation and adoption of the rules. The law, which was enacted nearly six months ago, is designed to ban TV ads whose volume is much louder than the programming they're shown with. House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked FCC acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn how many consumer complaints the commission has received since the law took effect; whether the FCC had observed any patterns of noncompliance; whether the FCC had received specific complaints regarding commercials inserted into video-on-demand programming; and how many waiver requests the commission has received seeking temporary relief of the rules.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said he’s concerned that the FCC may be seeking to exceed the congressional intent of the broadcast spectrum auctions authorized by the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act. He expressed the concern in a letter sent Tuesday to FCC acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn. “I believe the Commission should adhere to congressional intent and its mandate under law” when designing the broadcast spectrum auctions, Dingell wrote. “I am concerned that the commission may be acting or planning to act beyond such mandate in implementing the Act.” He asked Clyburn to respond to several questions about whether the commission believes it should complete international spectrum coordination with Mexico and Canada before reallocating and reassigning broadcast frequencies; whether the law permits the FCC to revise the model it uses to predict broadcast interference; and if the law permits the commission to conduct a weighted reverse auction. Dingell asked Clyburn to respond by June 28.